Familiarity
The world’s big, and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark. - John Muir
If it were snowing right now, with each snowflake a memory, I would catch every single one that contained some glimpse of fishing at Lake Monroe with Dad. I’d try and draw it closer to my heart, ignorant of the truth: that my tiny piece of happiness had already melted.
To say that lake had the idyllic white sand of a summer lake home would be an overstatement, with the crazy drivers and junk washed up on the unkempt shores. But to us, a family who knew the value of fresh food and even more, the value in working hard to get it, the lake was a cornucopia. I didn’t understand that back then, but what I did know was that happiness was at our doorstep when Mom announced a fishing trip, and when I heard the jingling of Dad’s fishing bells.
I’ve moved now, and I don’t think I’ll be watching the sun set over Lake Monroe anytime soon. But it was that beautiful lake that gave me nothing short of a childhood, and it was the lake that brought our family together like nothing else could.
Paradoxical
The ship of Theseus - does an object with all its parts replaced remain the same object?
I take extra time in the shower to smell my conditioner. It’s just a typical 12 ounce bottle of perfumed Dove, whose artificial scent I can’t even describe. But, I’ve ordered it so often that Amazon consistently asks if I’m running low. I’ve pledged myself to this conditioner for the simple reason that it’s my constant reminder of a promise I made to a friend as I left her: I’ll see you again someday. In person. So once the joys of physical proximity in friendship have scattered and faded, I will remain, with my mustard-yellow conditioner, in its bottle of memories and scent of love.
Philosophy was faced with paradox, but I am not. I am a patched-to-completion quilt of the projected and adapted versions of love which find infinite room in my human heart that strives towards the warmth of care. My colloquialisms, idiosyncrasies, and insecurities have been manifested out of the love I’ve seeked and its seamless fusion into my being. And so I find that the abbreviation for something so absurdly abstract, the simple truth, concludes that this is the same me. The only me, which is being integrated into a symphony that is endlessly complex.
Quantifiable
I love you 3000. - Morgan Stark
When I take a step back and look at myself, I see obvious correlations between my interests and my mindsets. Math revolves around logic, code is an overcomplicated recipe with a dash of jargon and a sprinkle of syntax, and speedcubing boils down to a couple hundred algorithms.
I think I’d like to view thought as an extension of human nature. These fundamentals—logic, nature, numbers, reason—reside on some primal, pragmatic level of existence, which has so much protected, untapped beauty to serve as a benchmark for discovery and a lighthouse for human creativity.
But this tier, this intrinsic level of “humanness” has another permanent resident. One which is a world away from the tangibility of logic and reason. One which has countless plays, songs, and poems to its name, one that has been romanticized, corrupted and fought for throughout history, and one that will never be tarnished by technology.
Love is our pinnacle and crux. Immortalized for its unheard of ability to tame the wild human heart, love is so vastly different from what we have laboriously cultivated out of the material world. The latter is fully empirical, the former something we don’t even understand, much less something which can be quantified. But maybe that’s just what love was meant to be. A prize cherished by all humans alike, whose inherence yields its universality and whose universality establishes it as a timeless cultural, societal phenomenon, and something that can only be described as so human.